“You’re from Amsterdam?” Bavink asked. “I am, thank God,” Japi said. “Me too,” Bavink said. “You don’t paint?” Bavink asked. It was a bizarre question to just ask someone, but Bavink was still trying to figure out what kind of guy this was. “No, thank God,” said Japi, “and I’m not a poet and I’m not a nature-lover and I’m not an anarchist. I am, thank God, absolutely nothing.”
That definitely appealed to Bavink.
The ship pitched, crashed, rolled, and swung from side to side; the water sprayed and poured over the rail; there was no one else to be seen on deck. Up ahead was an endless expanse of water, full of whitecaps; the shadow of a large cloud was a drifting island; far in the distance a black freighter pushed on, pitching wildly. “Look,” said Japi, “the City of Ghent.” You could see in the distance the water spraying up on either side of the bow; water churned and foamed and frothed around the propeller. The waves leapt with sharp crests in the hollow sea, green and blue and yellow and gray and white, depending on the depth and on the reflections of the clouds, nowhere and not for one single moment the same. A little tugboat was towing a barge and two tjalks.
“No,” Japi said, “I am nothing and I do nothing. Actually I do much too much. I’m busy overcoming the body. The best thing is to just sit still; going places and thinking are only for stupid people. I don’t think either. It’s too bad I have to eat and sleep. I’d rather spend all day and all night just sitting.”
This, Bavink started to think, was an interesting case. He nodded. Japi was holding his cap on his head with his right hand the whole time, his right arm propped up on the rail. The wind was blowing so hard that Bavink had to cover his nose with his hand to be able to breathe. Japi just sat there like he was sitting at home. Then Japi said that his plan was to stay in Veere for another few weeks, until his cash ran out.
Painting seemed nice enough to him, if you could do it. He couldn’t do anything, so he didn’t do anything. And after all, you can’t express things the way you feel them. He had just one wish: to overcome the body, to no longer feel hunger or exhaustion, cold or rain. Those were the great enemies. You always had to eat and sleep, over and over again, you had to get out of the cold, you got wet and tired or miserable. Now look at that water. It has it good: it just ripples and reflects the clouds, it’s always changing and yet always stays the same too. Has no problems at all.
All this time Bavink stood bracing himself with his walking stick, leaning into the wind, and nodding at Japi. He’s onto something there, Bavink thought. And he drily asked if Japi was also going on to Veere. So the conversation turned to Zierikzee, Middelburg, Arnemuiden, and all the places where they had both done plenty of walking and standing and sitting around. For Japi had in fact done quite a bit more in his life than just sit by the water in Veere. And Bavink realized before long that Japi could not only walk and stand and sit, he could see too. And talk about it for hours. And when they stepped onto land again at de Zijpe, Japi pointed southwest, at the wide tower of Zierikzee, dimly visible on the horizon, and said, “Fat Jan, patient old Fat Jan, he’s still standing. I thought so. Sure, he’s still standing.” And then Bavink asked if Japi was always in such a good mood and then Japi said “I am,” nothing more. And when they got to Zierikzee and stepped off the streetcar Japi flapped the soles of his shoes on the hot cobblestones of some unshaded little street that was just baking in the sun, and stretched, and said that life really was devilishly funny. And then he shook his walking stick threateningly at the sun and said, “Still, this sun! It shines but then it starts to go down, it doesn’t go back up again, when it’s after noon it has to set. It’ll be cool again tonight. Everyone’s eyes would pop out of their heads if it didn’t go down one day. Nice and warm, huh? My things are sticking to my body. The sea air is steaming out of my collar.”
So clearly this “overcoming the body” stuff wasn’t meant quite as literally as all that.
At the table, Japi was more than talkative. He talked enough for three, and ate enough for six. “The sea air digs a hole in you,” they say in Veere. He drank enough for six more and sang the whole shanty of the Nancy Brick. In short, he was bustling and boisterous and Bavink thought a guy like this is worth his weight in gold.
That he was. In the afternoon he took Bavink to the canal ring and walked him three times around Zierikzee. His mouth never stopped moving and his walking stick kept pointing and when the Zierikzeers stopped and stared he walked up to them and called them “young man” and asked after their health and clapped them on the shoulder. Bavink doubled over from laughing so hard. Japi was good at getting even with those well-disposed cultured Dutchmen who have no patience for anyone who doesn’t look at least as stupid and tasteless as they do, and who scoff at you and say things about you to your face, in public, as though pastors and priests in even the tiniest villages hadn’t been trying to raise people properly for centuries. Japi was a workhorse and he could lay into people, if needed, with such skill and force that even the most brutish lout had to knuckle under. Things didn’t go that far in Zierikzee. People in Zee-land are actually pretty nice. Japi liked to say, “The one thing I’m sorry about is that there isn’t a brawl in Walcheren every now and then.”
For two days Bavink and Japi tromped around Veere and already they were thick as thieves. They sat together for hours on the roof of the Hospitaal and looked out over Walcheren and de Kreek and Veergat and the mouth of the Oosterschelde and the dunes on Schouwen. There was Fat Jan again, the Zierikzee tower, now to the north. And there was Goes, and Tall Jan, the Middelburg tower, the spire around which Walcheren turned, the heart of this world. And the tide came in and the tide went out; the water rose and fell. Every night the limping harbormaster came and first he lit the green light on Noorderhoofd, the breakwater, then he came back down and then he had to go around the whole harbor and then you saw him by the tower again and then he opened the wooden gate and climbed the wooden steps and lit the light in that tower too. And then Japi said “Another day, boss,” and the limping harbormaster said “Yes, sir, another day.” And then when you looked toward Schouwen, you saw the light blinking on and off as it turned. And an hour out to sea the buoy floated and its light shone and went out, shone and went out. And the water sloshed up and down and all through the night the sun that you couldn’t see slid past in the north and the last light of day that you could see slid past in the north along with it and turned into the first light of the new morning. One day touched the next, the way they always do in June.
For the earth everything was simple enough. It just turned on its axis and followed its course around the sun and had nothing to worry about. But the people on it fretted out their days with troubles and cares and endless worries, as though without these troubles, these cares, and these worries, the day wouldn’t turn into night.
Japi knew better. The sun went down into the ocean by the Walcheren dunes on its own. But Bavink was in a bad way sometimes.
Bavink was someone who usually worked hard. People thought he was pretty good. He had a good laugh about that. He didn’t sell anything when he didn’t have to; he put aside his best work and never looked at it again, always dissatisfied. As long as he was working everything went fine, as soon as he stopped he suffered; sometimes he was half dead with fatigue. If people knew how he really saw things, how things gripped him, they would laugh at his bungling, his dismally botched attempts to reproduce that majesty. There were times when Bavink did nothing, just let himself go, neglected everything, looked lazily at everything and thought it was “nice” that things were “so damn beautiful,” as he put it. Times when he felt a pain in his skull thinking about all his futile efforts, his “admirable work.” Admirable work! It made him want to throw up just thinking about it. “Admirable work,” they said. They didn’t know the first thing about it. God obviously hadn’t kicked them around like Bavink.